A considerable number of voters still believe that President Donald Trump is honest, despite the mountain of evidence of his lies. And, according to one New York Times columnist, an insidious myth underlying American culture explains the problem.
In his latest “Takes” series video posted to YouTube, liberal NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie highlighted some of the recent findings from one of the outlet’s focus groups, specifically, one that spoke with disaffected past Trump voters. One response, from a 50-year-old white independent named “Sebastian,” was “genuinely interesting,” and “so illustrative of a dynamic that is very common in voting.”
“I was hoping he would learn from the first time,” the respondent said. “All politicians lie and tell you what you want to hear, but I voted for him because he was something different. He spoke the truth; he spoke what was on his mind. That’s what appealed the first time. I was hoping the second time around he learned something from his mistakes and learned something from, ‘OK, now I know how to really fix this, and it’s not going to be the same old, same old.’ I felt like I was just picking the lesser of two evils. I went with the one that I was in line with more as far as economics, and was thinking that he would fix those, which doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Bouie made particular note of Sebastian’s belief that Trump was a “truth teller,” an idea that might seem “insane” to most observers. As he explained, Trump’s open bigotry has done a lot to convince a certain subset of Americans that he is being honest with them.
“Trump is the definition of a guy who has a very loose relationship with anything like the truth,” Bouie explained. “But this is where Trump’s bigotry comes in; this is where his racism comes in.”
According to Bouie, many people perceive the racist things Trump says as being true because many people perceive things that are racist as being true. “Trump’s willingness to say them, and say them openly, does not code to many voters as him being a bigot. It codes to them as him being someone willing to say what is truthful about the world.”
He continued: “Moreover, we have this cultural archetype of the kind of lovable bigot, even the lovable outer borough New York bigot: Archie Bunker is the most famous example of this. Tony Soprano is a version of this. This exists in our cultural landscape and makes a guy like Trump quite legible. They don’t see him as someone who holds genuine racial animus. They see him as a guy who’s willing to say what is on his mind, willing to say what he believes is true and he ultimately doesn’t really mean it like that.”
Furthermore, Bouie argued that, to these same Americans, the effort other politicians put into being “more judicious” and careful about what they say comes off as dishonest and trying to hide things, even if, he added, most politicians actually are doing their best to be as honest as they can be.
“I would say that this gets things completely a—— backwards, but it’s how I believe a lot of voters approach these things,” Bouie continued. “One way to think of all this is that Trump’s political skill … is that he can be many things to many people. People project onto him what they want to see and then they act accordingly, and I think what we’re witnessing now is the extent to which a lot of voters, having projected something onto him that they want to see, are taken aback, shocked, appalled by the fact that that is not the reality, that that is not the truth, that the Trump that they have imagined is very different than the Trump who exists in reality.”